What does the fable "Silence" mean?

I've been reading the "Silence" a fable by Poe but I haven't been able to understand the meaning. Please help me by sending a summary of the fable.

Thank you,

Natalia López

-- Anonymous, September 24, 2002

Answers

The Demon narrates his amusement of tormenting a classical thinker
seeking solitude to ? the writer who is not amused, because the horror
bothers him too. Set as an Islamic tale(the demon is like a Djinn) it
is about the disturboing side of nature and reality, the flip side of
its beauty and music. The river Zaire sets it in Africa, so the man
might represent the end of Western Rome and the flight to monasticism
etc.

As in his poem "Dreamland" a dreamscape poem like "A City in the Sea"
there is a tension between silence and motion in a land of the dead.
As in his novel Pym and his essay about a travelogue in the middle
east dealing with a cursed land, Poe seems to be trying to work a real
experience and/or dream of his own. An early poem about childhood that
concludes with "of a demon in my view" seems to show that this
revelation of profound dismay in nature goes back quite far. Many
elemnets of Fable suggest the haunting legends of the Hebriedes
islands he visited as a child when in Britain. Enclosure by the dark,
tal forest(claustrrophobic), the mournful motion without wind of the
dire, fantastic landscape, afflict the man on the rock of DESOLATION.
He has no peace, no silence in his mind or his environment, desolate,
worn, disturbed. The demon is bothered however and manipulates the
scene in several ways at night to no avail. He even lets loose with
real noise(hippopatmi) and real wind.

Finally he gets it right. Everything mirrored the man's soul so he
found, if not peace, at least harmony in his environment. The demon
removes all noise,all wind, all motion. The rock changes to SILENCE,
an utter devastation and void beyond mournful desolation. From this
the man flees. The demon goes back to his tomb,laughs and the end is a
tableax of another silent closed circle where a token beast comes out
to stare at the demon. So who needs you narrator, go away! This fable
is a sideways attack that depersonalizes, empties the man listening to
the story as much as the victim of the story. Art can do what
experience does. Thus the "fable."

As for the philoosophical lesson(first it is important to get carried
away by the mood Poe is trying get you to expereience and the use of
silence as a climax of existential horror) read Poe's sonnet on
Silence which talks about the two kinds. Fable finally getsto the
second kind, the utter, unnatural void that attacks the soul too used
to relating to nature. The demoin there is the "Nameless Elf" a
haunting dread that fills the tormented soul when all else is silenced.